UrbanFeedback produced by Giles Rollestone and Sophie Greenfield, published by Perfect Indigo.
<p>
<h2>Urban Feedback</h2>
Urban Feedback is a CD-ROM Sampler, which features a collection of interactive games,
sound sculptures and cut-up narratives expressing visions of urban life - exploring the
impact on the individual of ever increasing media oversaturation.
<h2>Project History</h2>
This project initially began life in late 1993 and was exhibited at the:
The Creative Edge, Edinburgh, 1994 and was later featured in 'The Cyberspace Lexicon"
by Bob Cotton and Richard Oliver, published by Phaidon Press, 1994. Smaller-scale versions
of this project have surfaced on the Internet, accessible from specific web sites and
one CD-ROM magazine. The aim in 1995 is to publish [via Perfect Indigo] this project as an interactive Sampler on MAC/MPC CD-ROM, Issue 1 as part of an ongoing series.
<p>
In July 1995 we will have established a world wide web site for this project, which we
hope will be accessible from the CD-ROM but more importantly will enable an internet
version of the title to be developed.
<h2>Theme</h2>
The main theme for Issue 1 is "mapping urban environments", focussing on everyday experience in both real and virtual worlds. Visual "essays" will describe the daily
experiences and journeys within an urban environment as well as tracing the ideas and thoughts of individuals emersed in new technologies.
<p>
Personal maps reflecting journeys through streets, exploring the chaos of overheard conversations, texts, sampled sounds and sound sculptures, abandoned words and
fragments of found dialogue.
<p>
These collections of sound and images are loosely divided into three landscapes:
<br>
1. MediaSpace - a zone dedicated to the visions, words and ideas of philosophers and writers who have shaped the language we use to decode modern media saturated life.
<br>
2. SoundSpace - a collection of interactive toys which create new and different sound when the viewer or user combines them in different ways.
<br>
3. MemorySpace - an array of different collages constructed from personal reflections linked to journeys taken both in Europe and the U.S.
<p>
One of the central themes for the project and one of its navigational metaphors is the "Road". This will be reflected in the mixed media films (shot both in 8mm and Pixl Vision and also grabbed from VHS) and photographs from a recent journeys through California, an exploration of the iconography of the American road.
<h2>Urban Feedback online</h2>
<p>
The CD-ROM also provides a link to an online version of URBAN FEEDBACK, a World WIde Web site on the internet. "Urban Feedback" uses the CD-ROM as a gateway to access the site which will function as a forum for many individuals to post their own observations in the form of animations or collages of found objects. The object would be to create a 'patchwork' of personalised maps, link them together to the point where one could navigate from one fragment to the next across a virtual world. This could result in unusual virtual comunities.
<p>
<h2>Navigation and Interactivity</h2>
<p>
You enter an environment where your route is different each time, as is your starting point: the viewer is presented with a fluid, free-flowing environment, designed for instinctive, non-linear travel.
These journeys and the confrontations and events which shape them, take place in the title's
meta-environment the Road. There are clusters of ever changing and fluid events, sub narratives or sub plots. Appearing in the form of blasts of information, graphic poetry, people, artificial personalities who weave in and out of your journey.
The sampler randomly generates information, events and responses based on the viewers movements.
<p>
Some Interactive games/toys/events which are part of the environment:
<p>
1. Decoder - A device that reveals sub texts hidden within the visual environments.
<p>
2. Randomiser - a disruptive element which awakes when the user pauses or stops. It releases a confusion of fractured statements, cut-up movies, cut-up word play, unexpected poetic collages, musical onslaughts and mutating coded messages. You have to decode them to get back on the road and your journey.
<p>
3. The Road - The main body of the work divided into three main spaces or engines: Mediaspace, Soundspace and Memoryspace.
<p>
Urban Feedback is a vehicle for experiments in user interface design, animation and non-linear narrative structures. We aim to develop different ways of communicating personal identity, memories and reflections about the environments we live in and to create a great patch-work of personal diaries.
